Here’s What Bad Advice Can Actually Cost You — And How To Nix It From Your Life

The most expensive thing in the world is bad advice.

As for the most expensive kind of bad advice? It’s the kind which keeps you from taking action.

The problem is, this kind of bad advice has a way of accumulating. Especially if you’re someone who’s driven and looking to improve, people will call you a dreamer, they’ll tell you that you can’t do whatever it is you want to do, and at some point, you might find yourself believing that. In turn, you’ll hesitate from taking action.

It’s critical, however, that you don’t fall into that trap. You must distance yourself from that sort of negative, draining advice as much as you can.

Here’s how.

Know that many people who give you this kind of bad advice are projecting their life onto you, not trying to help you.

Around 10 years ago, I recorded an infomercial in which I flew around the country and spoke with students taking real estate classes at the university level. My team and I all thought the show looked great, but it flopped performance-wise. It didn’t drive the book sales we were hoping it would, nor did it generate the attention we thought it deserved. My team took it on the chin, though, and said, “Hey, we’ll get ’em next time. Let’s learn and move on.”

Flash forward one week. I fly to Park City, Utah, to conduct a Mastermind event with working professionals. At the start of the session, we all sat down around a polished conference table and discussed what, if anything, was holding these folks back from really achieving success in the real estate world, which is what this mastermind session was about.

Nearly every one of my students said the same thing:

• It’s not the right economy.
• I’ve been told I won’t find deals.
• My peers say I won’t find any money.

All of which — pardon my French — was bullshit. I know because I’d succeeded in the same environment. My students, I saw, were not being held back by anything other than persistent bad advice dispensed by people who were merely projecting their own insecurities and failures onto them.

Don’t take advice from people who aren’t qualified or who have only failed at something.

That’s what I told my students that day in that glinting conference room.

“It’s not that you’ve been seeking out advice that is bad,” I told them. “It’s that you’re taking advice from the wrong people.”

Ever since, I’ve made a change in my own life to be more careful about who I take advice from, simply because I know how expensive and damaging bad advice can be. For example, I no longer take advice from my parents pertaining to relationships or to love because they’ve both divorced multiple times and have generally proven that they shouldn’t be listened to on that topic. I love both of my parents dearly, but I know the truth: the advice of people who’ve failed badly or have generally underperformed is often skewed by their own bitterness. It’s poisoned, in this sense, and should be avoided.

Think about who in your life is giving you bad advice, and if they’re not qualified to be giving you advice on a certain subject, throw it away.

As my students in that Mastermind course showed, and as I’ve experienced over the course of my own life, heeding bad advice can cost you nothing less than your potential. It can cost you your enthusiasm for doing whatever it is you at one time wanted to do.

That’s why it’s so important to identify bad advice when you see it and avoid it more strategically if you can. The best way to do that is to vet people’s qualifications to give you advice. You should ask yourself: has this person proven successful in the field or industry I’m seeking insight into? Have they displayed sound decision-making? Or are they perhaps projecting their own mistakes and frustrations onto you?

If it’s the latter, avoid it. Know that you can’t afford to hear it.

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